MONTREAL - I have only once crashed a party. It was back in the ’80s on New Year’s Eve, on the beautiful Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Trapped in a house rented by my parents and desperate for a bit of fun, I headed off with a few friends to Jack Tar Village, an all-inclusive hotel nearby. We draped ourselves in party streamers, waltzed past security, and made a beeline for the ballroom where the hotel’s rambunctious New Year’s party was underway. The tables were littered with spent rum bottles and each featured a tray piled high with cigarettes. Up onstage, a chubby Rasta man with a glint of defeat in his eye sang Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree, while at his feet, drunken revellers — straight out of Trailer Park Boys casting — swayed and smoked. I made my way to the buffet and found remnants of stews, fried plantains and demolished desserts. We checked out the cramped, sweaty disco, but the scene was so grim there, too, that we slunk back out into the warm air thinking, if that’s what an all-inclusive hotel was all about, no thanks.

Of course not all all-inclusives are as dire. Years later, I stayed in the all-inclusive Trelawny Beach Hotel in Montego Bay, Jamaica, which was a definite step up. The fruit platters were copious and the pools were glorious.

I recall an abundance of rice, beans, goat water and pineapple tapioca. I exited that hotel not with a new-found appreciation of Jamaican cuisine, but a burgeoning addiction to pina coladas and one heck of a suntan.

Yet boutique-like hotel rooms and swish spas aside, even the top all-inclusives tend to have one downfall: the food. In Cuba, the extremely limited access to foodstuffs makes for some pretty bleak buffet spreads. Cuba aside, all-inclusives aren’t known as gourmet destinations. Even in the more glitzy hotels, the surroundings tend to overshadow the quality of what hits the plate. Don’t forget, these hotels for the most part are serving hundreds of meals daily, which means few ingredients are locally sourced. Chances are the only local fruit on that Caribbean buffet are the bananas.

But as the foodie scene continues to feed our subconscious, its grip feels tightest on vacation when we have little to do except polish off those last sips of coconut smoothie before slithering off the tanning bed toward the lunch buffet. Peruse hotel reviews on websites like Trip Advisor and you’ll see detailed write-ups not only of beach conditions and mattress firmness, but of the sushi bar, breakfast buffet, beach grill and where the upscale Mediterranean resto is a better bet than the Teppanyaki joint next door.

A recent holiday spent at the Paradisus resort in Punta Cana showed how food is becoming a draw as desirable as proximity to a golf course, a killer beach and spa pedicures. The most interesting development on the all-inclusive food scene is that the Paradisus chain, the luxury wing of Meliã hotels, with properties in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, has opened new restaurants fronted by multi- Michelin-starred chef, Martin Berasategui.

Having survived on a diet of toast and coffee for a week at an all-inclusive in Cuba, food quality now beats price point on my list of priorities when booking a vacation. As I had vacationed there two years ago, I knew these hotels were beautiful, and yet the food you ate while the Buddha Bar tunes and beach views wafted in the background was often better looking than tasting. Now two years later, the improvement is evident. The Paradisus Punta Cana has close to 700 rooms, and yet the main core of the hotel has 11 restaurants. While lounging on the beach, I eavesdropped on guests discussing at length which eateries are best. The Italian Palazzo? The steak restaurant? The Brazilian fusion restaurant? The Mexican? Or that gargantuan buffet next to the beach? I did them all, as I told two tattooed Torontonians at the pool and later to a group of bachelorettes from Atlanta at the bar, and the best food is at the buffet luxury section of the hotel called The Reserve, followed by The Grill place. The pretty restaurant with the flamingos swimming past, I warned, needs work.

In glaring contrast come the Berasategui menus in restaurants Fuego and Passion at the Paradisus resorts in Punta Cana. Complete with a wine-pairing option, the multi-course menus, featuring the chef’s famous “New Basque” cooking, include ingredients like hot foie gras, sea bass carpaccio, seared duck breast, braised rack of lamb, and Sous-vide-cooked 63-degree eggs. Customers pay an extra $40 to $50 for such racy fare, but we’re far from the pasta bar here. Plate presentations are minimalist, but with many courses in play, you walk away sated. Though there’s no denying the food lacks the sharpness you’d get at the maison mère, the vibrancy of local ingredients (I’m told all are imported from Spain) and several of the more cutting-edge cooking techniques, much effort has gone into this endeavour. The wine pairings were well-chosen, and boy, was the staff ever proud to be pulling out all the luxury stops.

It may seem odd to some to be sitting in a candlelit dining room in the Caribbean, dressed to the nines, and slicing through filet mignon instead of that grilled “langouste” we all dream about in this part of the planet. Yet like that Champagne massage, parasailing adventure, or nighttime variety show, that tasting menu is there to provide not so much holiday nourishment, as entertainment. Anyway, you can get that lobster at home now, can’t you? But where else but in an all-inclusive resort down south can you start off that six-course tasting menu with a banana daiquiri?

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